Robert Cervero’s research while affiliated with University of California, Berkeley and other places

Compared with many developing cities, urban travel choices are rather restricted in the United States, prompting most people to drive. Recently retired from the urban planning faculty at the University of California, Berkeley, Cervero draws from both personal experiences and 3-plus decades of research in making a case for opening America’s mobility marketplace to free-market forces, all the more important in this age of information technology and smart apps. It is argued that a rich mix of mobility options would take form as a result, ranging from smart jitneys to station cars and automated shuttles, that would better serve America’s increasingly diverse traveling public. The emergence of a host of microtransit services in recent years, like shared ride hailing and ­upmarket private minibuses, bears this out. More transportation choices and new mobility niches, experiences show, can give rise to less wasted and more judicious travel. Traditional urban carriers like public buses and metered taxis can also benefit from a more open, ­technology-informed mobility marketplace.

This book advances the idea of moving beyond mobility as a platform for achieving more sustainable urban futures. The first chapter adopted the term urban recalibration as a framework for doing so. Rather than sweeping reforms or a Kuhnian paradigm shift, urban recalibration calls for a series of calculated steps aimed at a strategic longer-range vision of a city’s future, advancing principles of people-oriented development and place-making every bit as much as private car mobility, if not more. Rather than driving down sustainability metrics such as vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per capita in one fell swoop through dramatic changes, it entails a series of 1 to 2 percent recalibration “victories”—intersection by intersection, neighborhood by neighborhood—that cumulatively move beyond the historically almost singular focus on mobility, making for better communities, better environments, and better economies. With urban recalibration, change is more evolutionary than revolutionary.

The transformation of the core city is a global phenomenon found in virtually every major postindustrial city in the United States and Europe, parallel with back-to-city migration. Chapter 9 focuses on urban and suburban transformations of the Global South; its fundamentally different conditions merit a separate chapter. The projects discussed in this chapter concern the reuse of former industrial properties of Western cities, including docklands, warehouse districts, and freight rails. Although there are many more cases of urban transformation, here we focus on the upgrade of former industrial transportation sites to accentuate the overall argument of the book: an urban recalibration from conduits to move goods to people-oriented places with a strong accent on aesthetics, amenities, and place-making.

Connections between and within cities are vital to the inner workings of a community. People need convenient access to schools, offices, and shopping areas to go about their lives. Unfortunately, much of twentieth-century transportation infrastructure has had damaging effects on communities. Dangerous and difficult-to-cross intersections and multilane roads have hindered people’s ability to move freely and children’s opportunity to play. Urban sidewalks are often unpleasant, unwalkable, or even nonexistent. Transportation infrastructure, epitomized by highways cutting through American neighborhoods in the 1960s, while connecting people on a regional level, had an unfortunate local side-effect: It reduced personal interactions within communities and obstructed their access to places.

We opted for the somewhat broad term contraction in this chapter’s title because it best captures what this chapter is about: shrinking the footprint of channel-ways given over to private cars and trucks and reassigning this space to other, less disruptive, more people-oriented uses, such as greenways, pedestrian zones, bike lanes, and public parks. More common terms are traffic calming and road dieting, although such measures are less about reclaiming land and more about slowing traffic flows to the pace of cyclists and pedestrians, or thereabouts. Even more extreme measures have been introduced to rein in the amount of pavement given over to cars, notably the demolition of elevated freeways, replaced by boulevards, greenways, and linear parks. Each is a different form of pulling back in recognition that the past half-century of transportation policies and investments in many corners of the world have been tilted heavily in favor of auto-mobility, at the expense of community quality and place-making. Contraction, we believe, is an apt term to describe a host of actions, from intersection neckdowns to freeway teardowns, aimed at reordering mobility priorities in favor of more sustainable modes and giving as much attention to place-making as to movement. Contraction is a form of land reclamation, which, as discussed in this chapter, involves reassigning land for place-making and green mobility purposes.

Public transport is touted worldwide not only for its ability to relieve traffic congestion, reduce energy consumption, and cleanse the air but also for its ability to support sustainable patterns of urban development.¹ One would be hard-pressed to find a policy document today on climate change, smart growth, or social inclusion that did not enthusiastically support expanding the role of public transit.

Cities across the globe have been designed with a primary goal of moving people around quickly—and the costs are becoming ever more apparent. The consequences are measured in smoggy air basins, sprawling suburbs, unsafe pedestrian environments, and despite hundreds of billions of dollars in investments, a failure to stem traffic congestion. Every year our current transportation paradigm generates more than 1.25 million fatalities directly through traffic collisions. Worldwide, 3.2 million people died prematurely in 2010 because of air pollution, four times as many as a decade earlier. Instead of planning primarily for mobility, our cities should focus on the safety, health, and access of the people in them. This volume is about prioritizing the needs and aspirations of people and the creation of great places. This is as important, if not more important, than expediting movement. A stronger focus on accessibility and place creates better communities, environments, and economies. Rethinking how projects are planned and designed in cities and suburbs needs to occur at multiple geographic scales, from micro-designs (such as parklets), corridors (such as road-diets), and city-regions (such as an urban growth boundary). It can involve both software (a shift in policy) and hardware (a physical transformation). Moving beyond mobility must also be socially inclusive, a significant challenge in light of the price increases that typically result from creating higher quality urban spaces. There are many examples of communities across the globe working to create a seamless fit between transit and surrounding land uses, retrofit car-oriented suburbs, reclaim surplus or dangerous roadways for other activities, and revitalize neglected urban spaces like abandoned railways in urban centers. The authors draw on experiences and data from a range of cities and countries around the globe in making the case for moving beyond mobility. Throughout the book, they provide an optimistic outlook about the potential to transform places for the better. This book celebrates the growing demand for a shift in global thinking around place and mobility in creating better communities, environments, and economies.

Suburbanization is a truly global phenomenon, fueled over the past half-century by modernization, motorization, and growing affluence of cities and their inhabitants. Also at play are the location-liberating effects of information technologies, the desire to escape central-city crime and congestion, and a general preference for more spacious, large-lot living as household incomes rise. The first wave of suburbanization—residents moving to dormitory communities, triggered by streetcar investments in the late nineteenth century—was soon followed by a second phase: retailers migrating outward to be closer to consumers. Suburbanization’s third wave saw companies and businesses following suit, leaving downtowns and setting up shop in office parks and corporate centers to be closer to labor markets and to save on rents, that is, the suburbanization of employment. Robert Cervero, America’s Suburban Centers: The Transportation– Land Use Link (Boston: Unwin-Hyman, 1989). With regional activities, and thus trip origins and destinations, spread all over the map, to no surprise the private automobile steadily gained ascendancy over these three waves of suburbanization. Suburban gridlock and environmental problems associated with it soon followed. Robert Cervero, Suburban Gridlock (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Press, 1986); Suburban Gridlock II (Piscataway, NJ: Transaction Press, 2013).